Linear White

It is something you feel when you are writing computer programs.

A normal person might experience something like this feeling if they are in a giant hotel filled with a million rooms.

They have to go into every room and ask the occupants if they are happy with the services provided by the hotel. This is the job.

While doing this job, many say they are happy. Some say they are unhappy. You ask them why they are unhappy, they say it is because the Air Conditioning has only one degree of precision in celsius, instead of 4 like they are used to in some other luxury hotel they visited.

So, it is 20.2 Celcius instead of 20.4902 Celcius. They claim this has disturbed their cicardian rhythms and has resulted in less optimal sleep. They leave a one-star rating and say they are never going to visit this hotel again.

You move another twenty thousand rooms of happy customers. And then you find another unhappy customer. They say the iced tea did not have the right prime number of ice cubes. In the previous hotel they were staying at, it had the correct number of ice cubes without them specifying it explicitly. This they said showed some great inattentives of the room service agents.

You wonder if it is even possible to anticipate what prime number of ice cubes some customer likes. But you note this down and move on another five hundred thousand rooms. You find another unhappy customer. They say the smart wall did not change colours in a way they liked. The pictures were too noisy in some way, they claim.

You ask them why was it noisy? They say it is because of the Air Conditioning. They claim the functors of the air currents created by the AC and the screensaver on the smart wall do not match. This creates some pervasive feeling of unpleasantness, they claim.

This is luckily an easier problem to fix than the previous complaint about the prime number of ice cubes, so you note this down.

Then you move another 200 thousand rooms. You find the room empty. You sit down and wait for the room occupant to arrive. Twelve hours later you figure out someone randomly booked this room, and there are no occupants at all. This was some person who was so rich he or she booked the room and forgot about it completely. The hotel you are working at has extremely strict rules about getting feedback from all customers.

So you track down their phone number and call them. They do not pick up. If you do not get feedback that is digitally signed by the customer, you will get fired for not doing your job. Therefore, you get on some flight to meet the customer. You find the customer is not present in their office.

You resign yourself to the fact that you will get fired and come back. Once you are back, you find the occupant sitting in the room.

The occupant claims they were following you around and are some secret reviewer of hotels, and that they booked this room discreetly to test how serious this hotel was in getting customer feedback.

To what lengths will they go to get customer feedback is one of the things hotels are rated on.

The reviewer informs you that you ranked only in the top 0.0001 % of hotels in existence on this metric. There is some snarky remark by the reviewer that this hotel will never be the best hotel in the world.

You realize this is all entirely your fault. And because of this the hotel’s rating in this hotel review magazine is not the best in the world. You feel depressed about this.

You move a few hundred thousand rooms and the end is in sight. This assignment will be complete. And you find another unhappy customer.

They claim they are rating you on how quickly you collect the customer feedback. And say you were not in the top 0.00001% of the hotels on this metric. This reviewer also leaves some snarky remark saying you will never be the best hotel in the world.

You now think this is a job for two people. When you reach the first empty room, you are supposed to split into two and one should go ahead and the other one should stay behind.

Luckily, you find out you cannot be blamed for this, because this spontaneous mitosis type of cloning technology is not present in your hotel. But apparently some other hotel has them.

It is something the inventors of this hotel chain have to figure out. The important thing is you cannot be blamed for this. You heave a sigh of relief, and reach the last room.

You open the door, and see a portal. It doesn’t look a like a room at all. You step in to the room and enter the portal and then you are magicked away into some alternate hotel chain, because your performance exceeded expectations and it was no longer optimal for you to work at this hotel.

The super-intelligent infinite mind allocators have decided to allocate you to some other hotel that was more suited to your personality and nature. This new hotel turns out to be a very poor hotel in comparison. You like rich hotels. You were happy with the job in the rich hotel. But apparently working at the poor hotel and improving this and collecting customer feedback here is more optimal. You do not know why, all you know is that this is optimal somehow. You begin your new assignment which is the same assignment, collect customer feedback from all million rooms in this new poorer hotel.